They rose to go and find a place for tea in Kew Gardens, among the happy, lazing Sunday crowds of those whom it has been the fashion to treat so condescendingly: England's big Middle-classes. There were the conventional young married couples; "She" wearing out the long tussore coat that seemed so voluminous; "He," pipe in mouth, wheeling the wicker mail-cart that held their pink-and-white bud of a baby. There were also courting couples innumerable....
(Not all of these were as reticent in the public eye as Gwenna had been with her lover before Leslie.)
To Gwenna the bright landscape and the coloured figures seemed a page out of some picture-book that she turned idly, her lover beside her. She had to remind herself that to these other lovers she herself and Paul were also part of a half-seen picture....
They sat down at one of the green wooden tea-tables, and a waiter in a greasy black coat came out under the trees to take Dampier's order. Perhaps that started another train of thought in the girl's mind, for quite suddenly she exclaimed, "Ah! I've thought of another German now that he was like!"
"Who was that?" asked Paul.
"Only a picture I used to see every day. A photograph that our Miss Baker kept pinned up over her desk at the works in Westminster," explained Gwenna. "The photograph of that brother of hers that she was always writing those long letters to."
"Always writing, was she? Was he a waiter?"
"No, he was a soldier. He was in uniform in that photo," Gwenna said, as the little tray was set before her. "Karl was his name, Karl Becker.... Do you take sugar?"
"Yes. You'll have to remember that for later on," he said, looking at her with his head tilted back and a laugh in his eyes, as she poured out his tea. She handed it to him, and then sat sipping her own, looking dreamily over the English gardens, over the green spaces flowered with the light frocks and white flannels of other couples who perhaps called themselves "in love," and who possibly imagined they could ever feel as she and her lover felt. (Deluded beings!)
She murmured, "What do you suppose all these people are thinking about?"